If five stars are not enough… Holidays around the Earth.

by Mauro Scanu | Apr 27, 2011 in Creating Opportunities | Leave A Comment

I was searching on Internet an unconventional place to spend my holidays when I found out that, for “just” 35 millions of dollars, I could stay for one week aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in orbit around the Earth.

Exactly as Guy Laliberté did in 2009 shipped by the Russian spaceship Soyuz. Two years ago the eccentric billionaire (founder of the entertainment company Cirque du Soleil) spent two weeks in space and from the ISS he launched a campaign to ensure the access to drinkable water to everyone in the world. His travel was planned by Space Adventures that in the last decade sent seven people in orbit and has recently declared that three more tickets are available for next future.

For sure these amateurs cosmonauts lived the most shocking experience of their life, but actually not the most comfortable one. As a matter of fact all the space tourists have been literally squeezed into the cramped ISS, alongside astronauts and their experiments. For this reason someone is thinking to build a pure space hotel with all comforts. “Our planned module inside will not remind you of the ISS. A hotel should be comfortable inside, and it will be possible to look at the Earth through large portholes,” told Sergei Kostenko, chief executive of Orbital Technologies. According to him the first module would have four cabins, designed for up to seven passengers, who would be packed into a space of 20 cubic meters. Food suited to individual preferences will be cooked by celebrity chefs before the mission. Orbital Technologies declared that its hotel could be in orbit by 2016.

Another similar project has been developed since 2007 by Bigelow Aerospace, a private company founded by an American hotel tycoon, which has been working to create inflatable space habitats for its own hotel as well as for corporate clients and government space agencies, going so far as to propose concepts for inflatable moon bases. Bigelow Aerospace has already launched two orbiting prototypes, Genesis I and Genesis II, explicitly designed to test the viability of a space hotel. NASA, for its part, is looking for inexpensive and creative ways to expand the usable space aboard the ISS.

Last but not least Eads Astrium, a French-German company, has been working on offers based on five stars space hotels, car races on Moon surface and regattas aboard spaceships.

I hope they’re studying also a kind of space train for those that are scared of flying…